Maurice White, founder of the band Earth, Wind & Fire, died Wednesday at the age of 74. The band blended soul, funk, jazz and a bit of everything else. White himself, though, was heavily influenced by the study of ancient Egypt.

After she moved to the US, the artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons couldn't return to Cuba for a long time. During that period of exile, she had a recurring dream about a train journey inside Cuba. When she finally returned to Cuba, the dream disappeared.

Forget the image of the newspaper delivery boy of old — these days it's more likely to be an adult driver throwing the paper on to your porch. It's part-time work often done by people who need more than one job to get by, many of them immigrants.

The solar industry got a big holiday gift at the end of last year — Congress extended a tax credit to build new solar panels. You and I can get the same deal for slapping panels on our roofs. Or if we don’t have a roof that works, for helping finance a few panels in a nearby field.

Luna Acharya Mulder has a rare window on the refugee psyche. She and her sisters grew up in New York but all of her cousins grew up in refugee camps in Nepal. Every summer, she went back and forth between two vastly different worlds.